01. At The Temple Doors02. Mountain Womb03. The Seraph04. Impure Days05. Curse Of The Watcher06. Absence Of Faith07. Second Birth08. Beneath09. Flaming Sword

Between Two Deserts, the first offering from Bulgarian Obsidian Sea is about 55 minutes of a traditional doom good time.

While traditional doom has pretty much been done - hey, as a stylistic descendent of Black Sabbath pretty much everything was done by the mid-70's - but when done well crushes. These Bulgarian blasters do it right.

Obsidian Sea have a knack for not only coming up with some strong riffs, but stringing those riffs together to create cool songs. They don't linger on the same riff for an entire nine minute track, they keep things from getting stagnant by switching things up with tempo shifts, riff changes, and just tweaking existing riffs.

Take "Seraph" for example. Starts out with a nice, rockin' mid-paced riff, but when after the chorus concludes the same riff has both a bass fill and winding guitar riff inserted into the space to keep it nice and poppin' fresh. Midway through the track, they slow it down with crushing power chords married to some drum fills before kicking off a wah'd solo over the initial mid-paced riff.

"Impure Days" sees the band trudging along for four minutes and change before they suddenly realize, "Hey! This song ends in a minute or so and we've a lot of music to play!" and shift to double time.

In addition to some strong songwriting that incorporates some swell riffs with all important dynamics, everything sounds great as well. Production gives all components some space, the guitar tone works, and the vocalist, clean with a good mid-range voice, is set well enough in the mix to be heard without overshadowing all the swell things going on.

Sure, not all the songs are aces - a couple just sort of go along, but for the most part these guys did a great job of working within the trad doom framework and crafting some headbanging tunes with enough going on to keep 'em interesting.